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Free agency has already started, in the sense that players are declaring their free agency, qualifying offers have been sent out, and all of that happy stuff that kicks off the period. Free agency hasn’t really truly gotten moving, though, even if players are able to sign already. There hasn’t been a ton of movement yet, just like there never is right at the beginning of what is a slow-burn process (that seems to move a little slower every year, too).
And yet, the Cubs have already quit on bringing in either the top free agent hitter or pitcher available, according to The Athletic’s Sahadev Sharma and Patrick Mooney:
The Cubs do not intend to deviate from this course, multiple sources told The Athletic, ruling out a pursuit of Juan Soto or Corbin Burnes even before all the baseball executives and agents checked out of the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort and Spa. Rather than pursuing talent at the top of the free agent market, the Cubs appear positioned to make noise in the trade market.
The “this course” mentioned above has to do with the plan for building long-term success. What, exactly, about signing Juan Soto would cause the Cubs to deviate from a long-term plan? He’s 26 years old, and just turned that during the World Series he helped bring the Yankees to in his age-25 season, in which he hit .288/.419/.569 with 41 homers and a 179 OPS+, powering him to an eight-win campaign. He’s going to cost an obscene amount of money, sure, but he’s also going to be worth that money, and it’s entirely possible he hasn’t even entered his peak as a player yet. Even if you have to sign Soto until he’s 40 years old to get him, it’s going to take 14 years for him to get there: this is not some 32-year-old free agent you’re maybe banking on a couple or few great years from before time takes its toll, trying to sign until his retirement. This is Juan Soto! A player whose very existence as a free agent is an opportunity for every team that passed on Bryce Harper to make good on their past mistakes! One of those teams, of course, is the Cubs.
The Cubs, who absolutely have the money to spend on any player they would like to, and more besides. The Cubs, who have their own regional sports network as of 2020, and are free from the revenue issues plaguing those aligned with Diamond and Bally. The Cubs, who finished at 83-79 in 2024, and didn’t attempt to help themselves do better than that at the trade deadline even as it disappointed their own players. There are three wild cards in each league now! Teams in the position the Cubs are in should be trying much harder than they are to try to get one, but they’d rather back into one while preaching about flexibility and long-term plans.
If your long-term plan doesn’t have room for Juan Soto in it, then, frankly, your long-term plan sucks. The offseason is just getting going, and the Cubs have already preemptively removed themselves from consideration for the kind of talent that doesn’t just show up as a free agent very often. The kind that could shift the balance of power in the league if he shows up on a team that was already great, or change the fortunes of one on the cusp of that.
Over at Defector, Lauren Theisen wrote about all of those horrid anti-trans, pro-Donald Trump ads that powered the MLB postseason, to say that it’s time to stop pretending the league’s Pride Nights actually mean anything:
…I don’t see any way back for Pride Nights as official team events—not after it’s been made crystal-clear they don’t care about us, just our money, and bigots’ money too. If years of these Pride Nights becoming increasingly consistent presences on team schedules only led to an autumn spent forcing those same fans to sit through transphobic propaganda or else abandon their interest in baseball, that’s a choice a lot of queer folks are going to make easily, and not to MLB’s liking.
MLB didn’t say a word about the ads, and why would they? As Theisen points out, they’d put themselves in the crosshairs of Trump if he had won the presidency — which he now has — and also, who’s to say MLB’s higher ups even disagree with the content of them? MLB cares about money. Pride Nights can net them money from one group. Letting television networks cash checks from advertisers spewing hate ends up getting them cash from another in the end. When all you care about is money, and the rest is all just trying to avoid having anyone get so mad at you that they stop giving you money, you end up in these situations where you try to have everything both ways.
And again, that makes sense, in terms of how a business is going to operate: despite Mitt Romney’s claims otherwise, corporations are not people, they’re corporations, and holding them to the standards of people on questions of morality is going to leave you disappointed way more often than it’s going to result in any kind of change. Anyway, read Theisen’s piece, which is available to non-subscribers.
My latest for Baseball Prospectus is only available to subscribers, but hey, fund independent media where you can, yeah? I wrote about how the Dodgers might not need Mike Trout in order to make their offseason a successful one, but Trout probably needs them. And at this point, the only argument for the Angels keeping him is one of sentimentality: they probably aren’t going to be any good again while he’s still Mike Trout as we know him, and dealing him might be the only way to clear the budget space and add the prospects they need to shake that roster up for what is going to have to be a long-term renovation.
Granted, long-term only because owner Arte Moreno refuses to spend over the luxury tax threshold despite having the resources to do so, easily, and also because everyone involved in identifying talent in the organization seems to think they’re employed in a different sport than they are, but still.
Craig Goldstein made a great point on Twitter over the weekend that I wanted to highlight here: the reaction to the story of a supposed 14-year-old international prospect with a verbal commitment to sign with the Padres actually being 19 is all about the age difference, and not an MLB team having a multi-million dollar agreement in place with a 14-year-old that they’re not supposed to have, owing to his not being old enough to sign yet. These handshake deals are common, of course, the Padres aren’t alone in this sort of thing, but they’re not supposed to be happening. The victim here isn’t the team for being fooled, is the thing.
You’ll probably get calls for an international draft to avoid occurrences like this in the future, but once again I’ll just point out that, were the existing rules enforced, there would be no issues that required another draft, one that will simply hand even more leverage to teams after ripping it out of the hands of international prospects.
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